Forum Discussion
How to set up a booking with multiple staff?
When you go into the service you can add staff by click/selecting that staff member. You can select as many staff members as you want and they should each receive notifications related to when that service is booked.
As you mentioned, I would deselect the option to have the attendee select a staff member so that neither of you is left out.
To be sure you are only booked for valid times when all staff are available, you need two things:
1) Each staffer needs to be using an Outlook/Office calendar linked to your staff member, and
2) Check this box on the staff members' configuration page - "Events on Office calendar affect availability" as this will only give the green light on the bookings page for times when all staff members are available. I believe this box is checked by default, just be sure it still is.
MitchS-SE - Are you saying that when you assign multiple staff members to a service, they all get booked when a customer selects that service? That is not the intended behavior. The ability to assign staff members to a service serves the purpose of limiting the pool of available staff members to which Bookings will assign an appointment when you don't let the customer choose a specific staff member, which is helpful when you have a team where members have specialties. If you don't assign staff members to a service, then Bookings will pick from all staff members that you added to your Bookings site.
What we found in our experiments was that if we didn't assign any staff member, Bookings grabbed one that was available (whether next or random I couldn't tell), but yes, the combination of selecting multiple staff members along with disabling the registrant from being able to choose a staff member had the effect of notifying all staff members of the appointment.
Picking multiple staff members but enabling the registrant to choose a staff member simply narrowed their options. If the registrant didn't pick/specify, then everyone got the notice (default behavior of the code as above I figured).
My guess was that then left the individual "shop manager" to determine which or all staff members notified should assist the customer. Sort of a "cover your bases" attempt to have someone qualified for a specific service be available for the customer in the event a staffer assigned wasn't available as planned (e.g. time overrun, out sick, etc.).
This assumption is based on the background that Bookings was originally intended for small shop keepers like hair salons, or personal trainers, or the like where there was always a F2F element assumed. Now with the addition of group bookings and such, we've got major scope and feature creep - which I'm having to explore to fit our needs.I will admit that I'm finding out that there is quite a bit of disparity in what features are available in different regions worldwide as well as what behavior to expect with different levels of M365 vs O365 and SMB vs Enterprise deployments, so YMMV. We're using this to allow self-registration for B2C webinars where our staff member is the presenter/moderator for the group session, so we haven't attempted to use the multi-staff session live. I don't know if a recent update has broken my experience or not. If so, I'd like to know for future reference.
MitchS-SE Very interesting ... I wasn't aware of any discrepancies in the available features or the behavior based on region or license.
Radhika_Khetan_MSFT - Would you please review this thread and provide some inside from the product group on these discrepancies? Thanks!
Can you please help with this. I also can't get the booking to appear on two people's calendars from the same mtg request.
